Minimalist views of value hold that “the less of a given bad, the better”, and further hold that the only form of positive value that exists is the reduction of bads (e.g. unmet needs). Negative utilitarianism is an example of a minimalist view, which specifically says “the less suffering, the better”.
An objection sometimes raised against negative utilitarianism and similar minimalist views is that they would (supposedly) imply the wrong choice between the following populations:
- “Near-perfect paradise”: a very large population of extremely happy lives that each contain a slight bad
- “Small hell”: a much smaller population that consists only of maximally hellish lives
Namely, because the large number of slight bads in the first population would make the totality of these bads worse in the aggregate, these views would conclude that the small hell is better than the near-perfect paradise. This seems implausible, and hence — the objection goes — so do these views.
The following are three of the main points I would make in response to this objection.
Only some (of arguably the least plausible) minimalist views imply this conclusion
The objection above assumes a certain view of aggregation (i.e. how we “add up” the bads in question) that is only entailed by certain versions of minimalist views, but not by others. That is, some views of aggregation, called Archimedean or “non-lexical” views, hold that mild instances of a given bad can always be added up so as to be worse than severe instances of this bad, e.g. that a sufficient amount of mild suffering can be “added up” to be worse than extreme suffering.
In my view, such non-lexical views of aggregation are highly implausible, and I think we have strong reasons to reject such views (see e.g. Vinding, 2020, ch. 4). Indeed, I think the objection above is itself a good reason to reject such accounts of aggregation, and to instead favor a view that gives supreme (i.e. lexical) priority to severe bads.
Such lexical views are commonly acknowledged by those who raise the objection above, but it seems that such views are often gestured at as though they are much more problematic than non-lexical views of aggregation. In other words, non-lexical views often seem presented as though they are the most plausible versions of minimalist views (and hence that the objection above is quite devastating to minimalist views in general), whereas I would argue, again, that such views are among the least plausible minimalist views (and hence that the objection is not at all devastating to minimalist views in general). In any case, it seems to me that the plausibility of non-lexical views of aggregation is often assumed without adequate justification.
Yet for the rest of this post, I will set aside the (im)plausibility of non-lexical views of aggregation, and simply grant such a view for the sake of argument. What can be said in response to the objection above from the perspective of non-lexical minimalist views? And do non-lexical minimalist views seem more or less plausible than other non-lexical views, such as classical utilitarianism?
What is the bad in question?
An important aspect to clarify is what exactly the relevant bad is. For example, if a view says “the less suffering, the better”, and defines suffering as “a negative overall state of experience” (Mayerfeld, 1999, pp. 14-15), it is important that we do not confuse this bad with other supposed bads. So to not miss their mark, objections that are targeted at this view should invoke this particular bad, rather than something else, and be carefully formulated so as to not describe this bad in terms that can too easily be interpreted as something else.
For instance, one formulation of the objection above claims that non-lexical negative utilitarianism would favor “arbitrary amounts of torture in order to destroy sufficiently many lives that combine one pinprick each [emphasis added] with otherwise blissful and fulfilling immortal lives of rich experience and activity.”
But this formulation is potentially confusing, since a pinprick is a form of stimulus, and hence a pinprick need not imply an overall negative state of experience, and can easily be interpreted in a way that involves no such state of experience. The objection would thus be more clear and to the point if it replaced “one pinprick” with “one mildly negative overall state of experience” or the like.
Another formulation of the objection above is phrased in terms of “lives of all-but-perfect bliss, … each enduring an episode of trivial discomfort or suffering (e.g. a pin-prick, waiting a queue for an hour)”. Yet even this formulation is potentially confusing, despite being phrased partly in experiential terms, such as “trivial discomfort”. For if we speak in terms of a classical utilitarian terminology, “an episode of trivial discomfort”, and even “an episode of trivial suffering”, could be misinterpreted to mean that one for a brief moment moves from, say, “100 units” of pleasure to 99 or 90 units of pleasure — or some other, less intense state of pleasure (cf. “suffering” in the sense of suffering a loss of something). And if misinterpreted in this way, the objection again fails to pertain to minimalist views centered on overall negative experiential states.
If one were to illustrate a truly negative dip in numerical terms on a classical utilitarian framework, it would amount to something like:
+100, +100, −1, +100, +100, …
Such a dip may feel intuitively unrealistic (e.g. because of the buffer effect happiness can have on ordinary sources of discomfort), and the dip might also not intuitively conform to the description of being “trivial” (because of the big absolute difference on this classical utilitarian framework). For these reasons, too, it seems worth being exceptionally clear and precise in how this objection is stated.
In sum, it is important that we do not confuse a negative experiential state with a certain kind of stimulus, or with a mere dip — even a large dip — in something else, such as pleasure. This clarification alone may render the objection above somewhat less implausible (compared to more equivocal versions of the objection). After all, on an empty-individualist framing that sees each consciousness-moment as a distinct person, this clearer formulation renders it apparent that the vast, “near-perfect-paradise” population in fact includes a vast population of person-moments that do experience an overall negative state, and who thus are genuine victims of sorts.
The corresponding implication of offsetting views is more repugnant
Having made this clarification, we can proceed to ask whether non-lexical minimalist views, such as non-lexical negative utilitarianism, are more or less plausible than analogous offsetting views — i.e. views that entail that a sufficient amount of purported goods can outweigh any bad — such as non-lexical classical utilitarianism.
Specifically, we can ask whether the objection above, directed at minimalist views, is more or less devastating than the corresponding objection to offsetting views:
Creating Hell to Please the Blissful:
Say we have a utopia with a vast population that is maximally blissful for their entire lives, with the exception of a brief moment in which they each experience a slightly less than maximally intense state of pleasure (e.g. they consistently experience a stipulated maximum of “100 units” of pleasure, except for a brief moment in which they experience only 99 units of pleasure ).
Non-lexical classical utilitarianism (and similar offsetting views) imply that it would be good to add a smaller population of maximally hellish lives to this population provided that it fully maximizes the pleasure of the (sufficiently) vast population of near-maximally pleasurable lives (because the vast increase in total pleasure would outweigh these maximally hellish lives according to such views).
This implication seems implausible, and hence so do these non-lexical offsetting views.
I would argue that this objection is far more devastating for non-lexical offsetting views than is the corresponding objection against non-lexical minimalist views. After all, in the example raised against minimalist views centered on the reduction of suffering, the vast and mostly happy population does — as clarified in the previous section — include countless (mildly) negative experiences, and thus in a sense includes countless victims (i.e. mildly afflicted consciousness-moments). While helping these countless victims by replacing them with a small hell may seem implausible (in my view unacceptably implausible), it nonetheless seems less implausible than does the addition of a small hell to a condition that contains no suffering and no victims, for the frivolous purpose of increasing the pleasure of a vast number of almost maximally pleasurable consciousness-moments.
As Anthony DiGiovanni notes, “misery is still reduced” in the example raised against minimalist views (assuming the non-lexical account of aggregation, that is), which arguably renders this example far less repugnant than the case of creating hell to please the blissful (cf. Vinding, 2020, ch. 3).
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Teo Ajantaival for useful feedback on this post.